Sometimes, it can be tough to find a way to spend a weeknight out of the house, especially if you don’t want to sit beside your companion in silence while staring at a big screen or wander the mall when you don’t have any money to spend. But that was before trivia nights came to town.

Sometimes, it can be tough to find a way to spend a weeknight out of the house, especially if you don’t want to sit beside your companion in silence while staring at a big screen or wander the mall when you don’t have any money to spend. But that was before trivia nights came to town.

Now, for four nights out of the week in the Holland/Zeeland area, going out for dinner comes with bonus points: trivia nights — offered at Serafina’s Bar & Grille on Mondays, Brann’s Steakhouse on Tuesdays, Vitale’s Pizza on Wednesdays and Curragh Irish Pub on Thursdays — are free, two-hour events in which teams answer questions for points during six rounds of play, culminating in prizes for the top three teams and sweaty brains all around.

And one of the best things about trivia nights, according to Jon Brand, a manager at Curragh Irish Pub, is the fact that anyone can play.

“We still have people eating dinner, and then they just join in and stay longer and have fun,” he said. “It’s … good for everyone.”

It’s a lesson my friend and I learned when we decided to try it out at Brann’s a week ago. One tip: show up early. With 10 minutes to spare, we still had trouble finding a table. After a few awkward minutes, however, a family got up to leave, and we soon were seated and ready to go.

Team Trivia Michigan, the company that comes in and runs the trivia nights in the area, provided us with supplies: a score sheet, pen, pad of paper and the first question of the night: “What is your team name?”

The game hadn’t even started, and already we were stumped.

After a short, surprisingly difficult, conference, we decided on “Paper Girls,” and we were back in business. The rules, laid out by our trusty host, seemed pretty straightforward: The host reads the questions aloud, and teams write down their answers and turn them in to the host table in the time it takes for a song to play, gaining points for correct answers. The team with the most points wins.

What followed was two hours of “duh” and “are you kidding me?” and “I can’t believe we got that right!” and “Yeah, I have no clue. You?”

We battled teams with names like “Crossroads Country Gospel Band” (the winners of the night) and “Beer Bongs on Parade” on topics such as world geography, literary quotes, sports teams, aliens, musicians and nursery rhymes — just to name a few.

What we discovered was that, despite our college degrees, there’s an awful lot we don’t know. Luckily, Trivia Night was teaching us a few things. Like the fact that the assistant to the gaffer on a film set is actually called a “best boy,” not a gaffer’s assistant, and Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are the children of comic book super villain Magneto and not … well, any other villain we could think of. Who knew?

Page 2 of 2 - We also discovered that we’re not terrible at guessing.

For example, what two-word term is defined as the process by which self-heating is followed by thermal runaway resulting in ignition without an external ignition source?

The answer, of course, is spontaneous combustion, an answer that I got right, much to the surprise of both of us.

The most important thing we learned, however, was that sitting with friends, chowing down on appetizers while exercising our brains was way more fun than movie night.

Two questions in, my friend and newly coined teammate turned to me and said, “We should do this every week. Seriously.”

We probably will. And if we do, we’ll probably check out some of the other venues that offer trivia nights, because each one also offers their own set of deals on menu items (for a full list of what each offers, visit hollandsentinel.com). Who knows? Maybe we’ll join the league, which is free to do online (teamtriviami.com). It hosts league championships, where teams compete across the state and winners get much bigger prizes.

In the meantime, we have to work on building our team. After all, with just the two of us, on our first trivia night, we came in fourth place.

Who knows what we could do with a teammate who actually knows anything about sports — or aliens — or super villains.